Restoring the Distracted Self

Hope in humanity can wane. Hardly a conversation can be had without someone glancing at their phone or watch. It’s seemingly impossible to drive in the city without seeing scores of people scrolling while at the wheel. At nearly every coffee shop, gym, and restaurant, the staff must be summoned from their digital stupor to engage in their work.

Attention is fractured. We feel endlessly restless. Too easily disquieted. “Unable to focus,” “unable to attend,” “unable to sleep” — these are constant confessions. And this moment provides an opening. People profit from this state of being. The current economy of distraction technologies is booming. The digital wonderland that is housed on what is almost laughably called a “phone” beckons. It’s no secret how easily our attention can be moved, captured, and commodified.

It’s too easy to be an alarmist. It’s too naïve to wish for yesteryear. Life hacks and the culture of minimalism won’t do, either. Technologies tug on something that’s deeply human, not merely a present problem.

Our trouble with attention is perennial. T. S. Eliot said we’re “distracted from distraction by distraction.” Robert Louis Stevenson bemoaned the “weariness of satiety.” And this is all well before the proliferation of portable, personal technologies.

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The inattentive self. Does it matter? Should anyone really care that a professor refuses to turn off his email while in his office? That the CEO checks her messages as soon as she wakes and just before she goes to bed? Is it really a problem that a young married couple must watch an hour of streaming videos before they feel ready to sleep each night? Should anyone worry that friends converse only by putting their heads down, moving their fingers on a screen, and commenting on what they see?

The answer to the questions is easy. It’s more difficult to quantify and qualify the damage.

What to do? Is there some practice that could help? Is there a habit that could lead to something like wholeness, something like health? Various suggestions have been made by thinkers across the centuries. The good ones have substance: no gimmicks, no quick fixes, nothing cheap. Music, gardening, cooking, and sport are some of the prescriptions. The throughline is something that asks for steady attention. An activity that doesn’t demand professionalism, but yet requires growth in skill.

I think of my wife’s gardening. Were you to walk into our backyard in the spring, you’d enter through a trellised canopy of wisteria, turn to a patch of strawberries, and look over to a satsuma tree adjacent to rows of long beans and okra — all dotted throughout with tall, florescent zinnias. Walking through our kitchen on a given day, you’d see a spread of books and folders, bins of intensely organized seed packets, and an impressively coded Excel spreadsheet. Emily’s practice of gardening moves her from distraction and directs her attention to a good work that benefits herself, our family, our neighbors, and our church.

Her constant study of the craft has led to an entire cabinet of used jars that sit at the ready for freshly cut flowers to be gifted at a whim to an unsuspecting neighbor or friend. Smiles and hugs abound through the simple cutting and sharing of homegrown flowers. This is a good that requires attention.

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We’re drawn in by all sorts of things. Our attention is captured by many a foe. We’re titillated all too easily. Zena Hitz finds that we “fall into the pursuit of spectacles, whether the spectacles of our own actions or the spectacles available to us from the view of the easy chair.” The novel. The outrageous. The ridiculous. The vivid.

The culprit, at least in part, is curiosity. This may sound absurd. Curiosity is to be praised. Isn’t it? It’s the mark of a truly sophisticated and nimble mind, one open to new information. But this is more fable than fact.

“Curiosity is a particular appetite … a particular intentional love,” says Paul Griffiths. The curious one sees the world as quantifiable objects: things to possess, to own, to master. Subjugation and control are premised in the life of the curious. There’s no depth, no wonder, nothing substantive. Curiosity “terminates at the surface,” observed John Webster. It’s the quick search on the phone to see what else the actor has played. It’s nearly every magazine waiting at the checkout of the grocery store. It’s to know someone in name only.

The other side of curiosity is, perhaps surprisingly, study. Study sounds bookish. And in a way, it is. But it’s more than that. Study makes sense of my wife’s gardening, my friend’s training for a marathon, my neighbor’s focus on making the perfect ginger beer, and my dad’s work of cultivating a beautiful berry farm on our land.

“Where curiosity wants possession, studiousness seeks participation,” declares Griffiths. It’s curiosity that stays in shallow waters, never daring to plunge the depths, refusing to stay disciplined in the deeper sea of thought. Curiosity is cheap; study is costly.

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One often overlooked act for tethering our attention is reading. Reading today is too often a work of consumption. We desire quick takeaways, the gist, the point, the summary. Reading today is a paradox. Too few read long, difficult books, be they fiction or non. Yet, we endlessly read texts — from emails to personal messages. Too often someone says, “I misread that email” or “Oh, I didn’t catch that in that text message.” Our inability to read less than a paragraph’s worth of information well is not unrelated to the larger practice of reading.

I’m sure many of the texts and emails aren’t worth our time. But reading, this little miraculous act of communicating with fellow humans, offers so much. We’d do well to reclaim the act of reading. Let there be a joyous, non-guilt laden habit of letting letters move from the eye to the mind and from the mind to the heart. Let knowledge grow. Let affections be stirred.

But my argument is not simply that reading will restore the distracted self. I have a more specific claim in mind. From college students to business leaders, from pastors to professors, from those who work at home to those who are homebound, here’s my case: we should read poetry.  

Odd, I know. Poetry doesn’t sit well with most people. It’s hard. It’s weird. And so on. I don’t dismiss such criticisms. And still I say, “Let’s read poetry.” Read the old. Read the new. Read short poems and long poems. Read famous ones and unheard of ones. Read not to become a poet. Read not to say at the next dinner party which poets you’ve just read. Just read.

Nonetheless, my interest is not to defend poetry. There are better people for that. My purpose is to tell how it is that poetry restores the distracted self — and always has. How it is that poetry gives us a new appetite. How it is that humans can inhabit health, in a Wendell Berry sense of the word.

Poetry has a way of slowing us down, pausing us. Poetry asks for attention. It demands it. “Poetry cannot be read in distraction,” says Berry. The purpose is to live in language. Feel it. Breathe it in.

“Poetry attracts our attention to language and to the mystery of words,” says the English poet Michael Edwards. As attention deepens, so too, presence. Edwards puts his finger right on it: “A poem invites us into the life of words, directs our attention to the sounds to be heard and the rhythms to be felt. Poetry exists in part in order to reveal the sound and the rhythm of a meaning, the cadence of an emotion, the breath of an idea, the depths of language that relate it to bodies full of mind and to a reality vibrating with logos, with intelligence.”

Poetry is paradoxical. It can hold opposites together without effort. Poetry is economical without being frugal. Words come like a thunderclap. You hear and feel. Words are so packed with meaning that they stand even the busiest body still.

Poetry confronts our instrumental sensibilities. It’s as if language is only rightfully used by marketers, those who seek to persuade without giving any kind of argument. They know the job is done when my desire moves to the object they sell. No one needs a pickup truck that has a tailgate with seven to ten different configurations. No one needs a tailgate with built-in speakers. No one needs a truck that can “crab walk.” But when I see those commercials, there’s one thing I know: I need that truck.

Words of political ads, news outlets, and social media have hidden the meanings of words earthed deep beyond the soil’s surface. Instead, we experience words that are exploited for feeling and feeling that is exploited for clicks. Quick clips, flashing images, aggressive but memorable adjectives all fill our screens and blur our minds.

We need to taste language that has intention and care. We thirst for language that has fidelity. We wait for words that remind us of what it is to be human.

That’s something that poetry can do. Not all poetry. Not only poetry. But poetry, nonetheless. It practices an allegiance to language through its economy and paradox. Its images, figures, and metaphors hold together the mind and heart. Affection and critical thinking are inseparable when we read a well-crafted poem.

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Yet this essay isn’t bent merely on pleading for more people to read more poetry (though, that would not be the worst thing). Rather, there’s something more robust, equally enduring and timely, that calls. It’s the gift of poetry that God has given us.

For the Christian tradition, the Psalms have been the place where one’s thoughts, affections, and words are shaped. The beauty, simplicity, and complexity of this poetry welcome the novice and leave the expert in awe. The Psalter does so in part by capturing our attention. Its lines, images, sounds, and more help to move our attention, our heart, and our soul.

“The beauty of biblical poetry derives from our drawing near to God and God’s drawing near to us in those miraculous words” (Michael Edwards). Take the first psalm as an example. It begins with a word that induces wonder: Happy is the one … But happy (or blessed) in what sense? We have to consider what this little word means — and doesn’t mean — before we get into the poem. The imagination has opened.

The poem tells the truth. There is in fact a flourishing tree and chaff. There are places not to be. But the poem rests not on pure regulations. It ignites our imagination of what life with God is like. The imagination here involves our critical thinking and affection. The poem provokes. The poem sobers. The poem calms.

The poetry of the Psalms brings health. It’s restorative. One way it does so is by not letting us pretend that life is (or should be) easy. Psalm 3, for example, speaks of life that is hard and lonely. Few details are given in the poem: Many are saying to my life ‘There is no salvation for him in God’ (v. 2). The life of faith is not the life of ease. And Jesus is quite clear on that.

In the modern preoccupation of happiness, we can gravitate to thinking of (and striving for) happiness without hardship. The Psalms point in a different direction. Pain is part of life. Being harmed by the words of others is common. Having enemies who are real is real. Psalm 3, called a lament, shows us that assessing a situation with clarity and truth is part of life. But that is not the end.

This poem doesn’t just tell a story. It’s not a biography of a saint. It’s a poem. It’s a poem that invites us in. We’re meant to live in the words; they become ours by participation (not by ownership). And in doing so, we taste what it is to suffer, really suffer. We also learn how to navigate the pain. Numbing ourselves won’t do. Binging shows, working out incessantly, gorging ourselves, starving ourselves, and buying stuff all come up short. Really short. This poem is a counter move, a subversive act. This psalm gives us the words. We call on God to deliver us (v. 7). The LORD is where salvation is found (v. 8). And the openness of the poetry lets us experience this truth in a way that resonates body and soul.

“Biblical poetry invokes and glories in complexity” (Katie Heffelfinger). These poems are precise and paradoxical. And they require all of us. God is not a rock, and yet, he is. No word is wasted in poetry. We live by these life-giving words.

Many of the Psalms take up residence in the dark. We read of joy but deep deprivation. These poems help us attend. The words live in our bones. And the history of the church is a witness to the fact that the Psalms do something. The form of poetry is uniquely shaped to shape us. The language of the Psalms is meant to draw our eyes and ears so that our hearts become habituated and aimed aright.

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Attention may be the most significant resource we have. It’s easily swayed by the shiny. It can be captivated by the spectacle. Poetry is not unaware. Poets understand well the current of electricity that runs through their lines. Readers of poetry know what it is for their hair to stand on end.

The Psalms make use of all of poetry’s resources. Being with the Psalms changes our posture. Our attention is re-shaped. Our language is re-formed. And our affections are re-directed. The Psalms through paradox, imagery, sounds, juxtaposition, concise lines, and openness let us speak, pray, and sing. These poems given from God, who is indeed good, repair our attention. They are the verbal vehicles for how God restores the distracted self.

It’s not the curious but the studious who “inhabit a world of gifts, given things, which can be known by participation, but … can never be possessed” (Paul Griffiths). The Psalms are indeed “a unique gift of language enabling human beings to communicate with God in all situations of life” (Hermann Spieckermann). These poems, these gifts, these much-needed guides for our attention await. They welcome us in the corporate gathering of the church and in the private study of a home. We participate. Wholeness and healing rest in the wake of reading God’s poetry.